By Luke Kleveland
Staff Care Specialist, Train – Develop – Care
“Let’s sit in silence for ten minutes. We can hold this space for you to listen to the Lord,” Steven, my spiritual director, said to me.
Steven is very intentional to listen to God in prayer. Our spaces of silence and attentive focus on God have become favorite moments for me that have made room for God to speak through Scripture, images, and words—and usually all three at once. Recently, the image God used was Jesus reaching down to pick me up by the forearm, saying, “Come!” John 21 came to my mind.
Before COVID, I would not have imagined doing spiritual direction with anyone. In fact, if you had asked me about this five years ago, I probably would have looked at you in confusion because I didn’t really know what it was, and then with skepticism because I thought it was purely mystical stuff. Little did I know how my journey with Jesus would change my perspective.
I grew up in the Midwest, in a conservative Protestant community that gave me a great foundation in Scripture. Jesus revealed Himself to me through the confirmation class I took. But I still needed to grow, mature, and be molded in my faith.
God taught me to wrestle with Him when He exposed my chronic anxiety during COVID and started to speak to the depths of my being. During this time, I learned more about spiritual practices, and God has used some of them—like silence and solitude, Lectio Divina, and sabbath—to bring life to my soul. Spiritual direction came into the picture shortly after.
I didn’t know what to expect in my first spiritual direction session. Would it be awkward? Good? “Mystical”? Something else? But the descriptor that surprised me coming away from my first experience was “refreshing to my soul.”
My spiritual director treated our time and space as sacred. He lit a candle to physically symbolize the light of Christ among us, and we reflected on that in silence. Then he just listened to me. His questions (and they weren’t many) were from thoughtful prayer and helped me reflect more deeply on what I had been saying. His desire was to draw my attention to what God might be doing or saying to me in this moment.
God has met me in my times of spiritual direction, inviting me into more intimacy with Him. How might He meet you where you are if you tried spiritual direction? I wonder what He might say to your soul.
